5/03/2005

Pat Robertson: Madman:The Rude Pundit's been wondering for a long time why interviewers still talk to Pat Robertson, a crazed, hubris-filled idiot who tells people to put their hands on their TVs and their emphysema will disappear, those nasty non-healing wounds will close, and they'll get erections that last for days. And the reason was made crystal clear on Sunday's This Week: because Pat Robertson is head pudsucker of the batshit insane troop of headline whores and you never know what nutso shit is gonna spout from that smarmy mouth of his.

Apparently, the filibustering of a few judicial nominees by Democrats is "the most serious threat America has faced in nearly 400 years of history, more serious than al Qaeda, more serious than Nazi Germany and Japan, more serious than the Civil War," as host George "Behold My Gorgeously Coifed Bedhead Hair" Stephanopolopolopoulos put it, to which Robertson oozed, "George, I really believe that. I think they are destroying the fabric that holds our nation together. There is an assault on marriage. There's an assault on human sexuality, as Judge Scalia said, they've taken sides in the culture war and on top of that if we have a democracy, the democratic processes should be that we can elect representatives who will share our point of view and vote those things into law."

Quick run-down here: Nazi Germany and Japan, in addition to the whole genocide thing, killed hundreds of thousands of Americans in a war. The Civil War ripped apart the nation, creating divisions that last until today, resulted in more than 600,000 deaths, and the assassination of a President. Al-Qaeda's 9/11 attack not only killed 3000 people, but it undermined the way in which Americans relate to each other and the world. "Activist" judges might end up allowing gay people to get married. Seems like a fair comparison, no?

But, in case you doubt Robertson's word, well, there's higher authorities that will put the smite down on your disbelief. Stephanopolopolopoulos played a clip from earlier in the year where Robertson told 700 Club viewers (known here in Real World Central as "fucking idiots") what God told him was going to happen: "What I heard was that Bush is now positioned to have victory after victory. He'll have Social Security reform passed, that he'll have tax reform passed, that he'll have conservative judges on the courts."

Robertson said to Stephanopoulos that things were on the path for God's words to come true, and that, while God doesn't change the laws of nature (because, you know, he invented them), he is listening: "In terms of human affairs I do think he answers prayer and I think there have been literally millions of people praying for a change in the Supreme Court. The people of faith in this country feel they're on a tyranny and they see their liberties taken away from them and they've been beseeching God, fasting and praying for years, so I think he hears and answers their prayers."

Two problems here: 1) How fucking out of your mind do you have to be to "fast" so God will listen to your "prayers" over the Supreme Court? 2) And, really, and the Rude Pundit's said this before, is God's PDA so empty that he's got the time to fuck around about whether the next Supreme Court nominee is really, really fucking insane right wing or just plain ol' fucking insane right wing? 'Cause, see, if the Rude Pundit were an all-powerful deity, he might wanna change some hearts in Darfur or, say, North Korea.

See, in clinical terms, Pat Robertson is, well, crazier than a shithouse rat (look it up: that diagnosis shows up in the DSM-IV, right after "crazier than a shitfight in a monkeyhouse"). Whatcha wanna go with? Delusional Disorder, Grandiose Type? Where one can be a functioning person, just having shit like voices in your head, and delusions of "inflated worth, power, knowledge, identity, or special relationship to a deity." Paranoid Personality Disorder? Marked by a sense that "disaster is on the horizon," that "the world is full of enemies," that "accidents are doubtful; negative events are initiated by others with hostile intent," that "all events relate to self," that the individual is "never to blame or guilty (others are)," and that the individual is "different from the rest of humanity, often with pretensions of having unique awareness or insight."

Damn, there's nothing finer than watching the crazy people on the TV. It's like putting a webcam in the waiting room at Bedlam - who knows what's gonna happen? Will someone try to chew off her own arm? Will someone grin with glee as he pisses himself? Will someone just stand there and shriek? Or will someone answer the voices in his head, calmly, rationally? They're always the scariest ones in the asylum.